Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Sarah Walker. In this new series, Walker continues to develop her highly active and dense surfaces, this time primarily on panel rather than paper. Structures found within technology, the sciences, nature and architecture provide ... Read more
Pierogi is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Sarah Walker. In this new series, Walker continues to develop her highly active and dense surfaces, this time primarily on panel rather than paper. Structures found within technology, the sciences, nature and architecture provide the internal organization and logic for her paintings, which work to visually organize information.
Through successive layers of paint “I inset intricate geometries within what seem to be sinking archipelagos and dissolving perspectival systems, which are themselves the residue left over from past layers. In this way spaces emerge, transform and then decay, always leaving a trace in the final painting. A self-imposed rule dictates that every layer remain partially visible.” (Walker, 2010)
To achieve this, Walker applies very liquid paint that she either partially wipes away or allows to dry crusted and cracked, always leaving at least a trace of underlying layers. She paints into each layer, bringing forward underlying layers, pushing back overlying ones. “Every layer is both obliterated and preserved multiple times merging foregound, middle ground, and background and with it past, present, and the forecast of a future.” (Walker)
Walker’s earlier works can be seen as attempts to visually organize the information overload around us. In her recent paintings she deals further with the chaotic and multi-dimensional reality of existing simultaneously in the data overload of the real and the virtual worlds. One painting, titled “Everywhere Is Always,” hints at Walker’s attempt to get at where the so-called real and virtual have merged and the two realms are no longer easily distinguishable. This is a world where fixed terms have yielded to fluid states and where there exist multiple and ever more permeable realities. Each painting, with its surface of maximal density, “parallels the state of being to be found within spaces that are virtual, dematerialized, and interwoven.” (“Manifest Densities,” Maier, Lee, Walker) They simultaneously work to allow the visual co-existence of the material and non-material.
Sarah Walker’s work has been included in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions and is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Decordova Museum, the Neuberger Museum, and the Rappaport Foundation. She is a recipient of the Rappaport Prize. This will be Walker’s third one-person exhibition at Pierogi.
